BEIRUT — A young, red-bearded ethnic Chechen has rapidly become one of the most prominent commanders in the breakaway Al-Qaeda group that has overrun swaths of Iraq and Syria, illustrating the international nature of the movement.

Omar Al-Shishani, one of hundreds of Chechens who have been among the toughest jihadi fighters in Syria, has emerged as the face of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS), appearing frequently in its online videos — in contrast to the group’s Iraqi leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, who remains deep in hiding and has hardly ever been photographed.

Exhibit A: This past Sunday, the first day of Ramadan, the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared himself the “caliph”—the holy leader—of a new Islamic state and ordered all Muslims, not just in the region but worldwide, to pay obeisance to him and to no other Muslim leader.

Some may take this as a sign of his movement’s growing strength and confidence. But if the history of grandiose caliph-wannabes is consulted, it resembles more a sign of delusion and desperation.

Only a small fraction of the world’s 1.5-billion Muslims have the slightest interest in recreating the caliphate of the seventh century, and many of those who do have someone else in mind as caliph. Some of these dissidents live in the ISIS leader’s neighbourhood, not least the followers of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of al-Qaeda.

And so we are seeing the deepening of a fissure within Sunni radicalism—a split has been growing rancorous for some time.

The most obvious sign of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s pretentiousness is that the ground his men have overrun hardly constitutes a nation-state. He hasn’t set up a government, collected taxes, provided services, created institutions, or done any of the other things that real states routinely do all over the planet.

Another sign: Baghdadi has plundered certain Iraqi cities, but it can’t be said that he’s conquered them. By all accounts, ISIS troops marauding through Iraq number fewer than 10,000. This is not enough to storm Mosul, Tikrit, and Fallujah — and leave behind enough men in each place to control the terrain.

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In its first few days, the ISIS onslaught met no resistance. The Iraqi army — in Mosul, an entire division of American-trained soldiers — simply fled, leaving behind their uniforms, weapons, and vehicles. But this wholesale surrender had little to do with the military prowess or spiritual appeal of ISIS.

Once ISIS “cleared” Mosul and the other towns of Iraqi security forces, its armed men moved on. They left things in the hands of local Sunnis — mainly Baathists, officers from Saddam Hussein’s disbanded army, who consented to this alliance-of-convenience with ISIS because they shared its goal of overthrowing Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s Shiite prime minister. But most of these Baathists are secular; they don’t share their tactical partners’ devotion to sharia law, much less Baghdadi’s demand to obey him as the one and only Muslim leader. Deborah Amos recently reported on NPR that many Christians, including the archbishop of the Chaldean church, have returned to Mosul after initially fleeing to Kurdistan, in part because the ISIS militiamen who scared them away are for the most part gone.

The Middle East’s politics are getting very strange, but the strangeness isn’t likely to include a caliphate

As ISIS and its allies darted southward toward the Shiite-dominant capital of Baghdad, Iraq’s security forces started putting up a fight; they were defending their homes, their sectarian solidarity, their state — and they got serious. They were joined by Shiite militias and Iran’s Quds special forces. Russia is now offering Iraq advanced combat jets (whether any Iraqi pilots know how to fly them is another matter). And of course, 300 American “advisers” are setting up a “joint operations center.”

None of this is to argue that ISIS (which now calls itself simply IS, for Islamic State) poses no threat. Thanks in part to its rampage in Mosul, where it seized many weapons and robbed several banks, the group may be the most well-armed and well-funded Islamist militia in the world. But that doesn’t mean that it’s on the verge of forming a state, much less a global caliphate.

The potential coalition against ISIS include Iran, Syria, Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia (albeit ambivalently), Shiite Iraq, and even (once Maliki leaves office one way or the other) much of Sunni Iraq. If Baghdadi’s men cross into Jordan, the Israelis say they’ll enter the fight, too. The Middle East’s politics are getting very strange, but the strangeness isn’t likely to include a caliphate.